The Mystery Genre

[Pages:2]The Mystery Genre

By Katherine Schulten

A Brief History of the Detective Novel Crime stories have been with us at least since Cain killed Abel in the Bible, yet Sherlock Holmes is considered the father of what is known as the classic "Golden Age" of English murder mystery. Writers such as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and P. D. James went on to emulate this form, and today even a cursory glance at a mystery section in a book or video store will reveal the vigorous lineage of the great detective. Although Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins, and others had written mysteries before him, somehow, in the persons of Sherlock Holmes and his humble helper, Dr. John Watson, Arthur Conan Doyle captured the public imagination as no detective writer ever has.

The formula Conan Doyle helped establish for the classic English mystery usually involves several predictable elements: a "closed setting" such as an isolated house or a train; a corpse; a small circle of people who are all suspects; and an investigating detective with extraordinary reasoning powers. As each character in the setting begins to suspect the others and the suspense mounts, it comes to light that nearly all had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime. Clues accumulate and are often revealed to the reader through a narrator like Watson, who is a loyal companion to the brilliant detective. The detective grasps the solution to the crime long before anyone else and explains it all to the "Watson" at the end.

At about the same time as the English murder mystery was establishing itself, a distinctly different school of detective fiction emerged in America. This "hard-boiled" style of fiction took hold in the 1920s, the era of American Prohibition and gangster violence. Popularized through the accessibility of the "pulps"--cheaply produced, gaudy magazines that featured short, violent crime stories--the hard-boiled American detective contrasts distinctly with the classic English version. This detective is not a gentleman hero but a hard-drinking, tough-talking "private eye," often an outsider to the world of upper- and middle-class values. The classic setting is not a country house but the brutal and corrupt city, and the suspects might be anyone at all in such a vast and anonymous place. The action does not move in a series of orderly steps toward a logical solution but, instead, careens from place to place and scene to scene. As Dashiell Hammett, one of the originators of the genre, explained it, "Your private detective does not want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client."

The detective and mystery stories we read and watch on television and in film today can often be traced directly to one of these two original schools or may borrow from both traditions. In

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addition to the modern interpretations of Sherlock Holmes--such as MASTERPIECE's Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch, the commercial movies starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson, and Ian McKellan's aging Sherlock in the film Mr. Holmes-- characters as diverse as Mr. Spock on Star Trek, Dr. Gregory House on House, and Patrick Jane on The Mentalist are also direct descendants of Sherlock Holmes. Contemporary writers continue to reinvent the basic formula so that, over a hundred years since readers first met the great Sherlock Holmes, the detective story is more fresh, interesting, and popular than ever.

? 2003, 2015 WGBH Educational Foundation. All rights reserved. MASTERPIECE, MASTERPIECE THEATRE, and MYSTERY! are trademarks or registered trademarks of WGBH Educational Foundation. Masterpiece is funded by Viking River Cruises and Ralph Lauren Corporation, with additional support from public television viewers, and contributors to The Masterpiece Trust, created to help ensure the series' future.

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